11.16.08
Where’s the Beast?
For the past several days, we’ve had some sort of static on our phone line, and our internet connection has suffered. To the point that we were connecting at 19kbs and less. It was ugly. Took me 30 minutes or more to open four e-mails, looking for written directions the other night. Needless to say, I haven’t been able to post to my blog. What a blessing to be running at 24kbs. And to think, just a week ago, I was complaining about that! How little I knew about how much worse it could be.
A lot has happened in the past week. Or, rather, this weekend. I was still getting over my cold earlier this week, so I didn’t accomplish much. I managed to cut out an apron, but it’s been sitting on my sewing table for a couple of days now.
I went out Friday to run errands, and saw one whole corner of our electric rope fence was on the ground. I put the car back in the driveway and went out with a bag of post clips, because some of them have been known to break. But it wasn’t broken post clips this time; the ground told a different story. Someone ran off the road, went through out fence (between posts), and came to a stop a couple of feet from our forsythia bush. Then they backed up, dragging a part of our rope behind them, then got back on the road and went their merry way. Not one thought to the fact that there was an animal contained within that pasture and that it could get out. It wasn’t until somewhere around 11am that I went out, and it surely happened late at night or early morning, so it’s a wonder that the horse didn’t get out of the pasture. I suppose the only thing that kept her in was the fact that the fence was still on and when it’s on the ground like that, it makes a loud popping noise as it grounds out and she’s shown before that she’s afraid of that noise. That was surely all that kept her from stepping over the rope on the ground and ending up a block down the road sniffing the neighbor’s horses.
Lucky for us, electric rope is quite resilient. This corner was near a gate (the rope ties into a plastic gate handle and hooks onto a loop of rope on the other side) and one of our gate handles was broken due to the stress, but none of the rope, clips, posts or the other two gate handles were damaged, so it just cost us a $3 gate handle and 15 minutes or so to get it put back together. Can’t say that about a wooden fence that someone’s run through.
Saturday we went to a crafting party at a friend’s house. I got someone to show me how to knit in the round and I have been practicing today. Now that I know how to make knitting go in a circle, I can knit in the round just fine. I even practiced increases and decreases without a problem. Still, I find the extra needles get in the way, and I can still knit faster flat. I see no reason not to continue to knit my Monmouth caps flat, especially as they have a double-thickness brim, which is a bit tricky on just two needles; I can’t imagine working it on four.
Today there has been good and bad news. Good news is that someone who bought from me before has put in an order for 5 things, which is my first sale in well over a month. And I’ve had three different people on Etsy ask me within the past week how I managed to get my advertisement on MySpace, which means it’s getting seen. Bad news is that we can’t find the cat. He went out yesterday morning as we left for the party, but wasn’t to be seen when we came home last night. And he’s not been seen all day. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and it’s not like him to miss a meal. He’s been gone for some hours before, but never 24 hours. He’s fixed, so he shouldn’t be roaming a large area. I went out around the property and called for him late this afternoon, but didn’t see him or hear him. He has been known to get stuck in trees, but he always yowled quite loudly, so we were able to find him. We don’t know where he is or what might have happened to him.
